As Tim Worstall points out, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks is good news all around, regardless of your position on AGW:
Copenhagen is dead. Hurrah! And I say that as someone convinced that climate change is happening, we’re causing it, and we need to do something about it. However, what we don’t need to do is the ghastly mess that was being cooked up in Denmark.
They’ve essentially agreed to, um, well, try — and they’ll think a little bit more about what they’re going to try sometime later. And that’s the best result we could have hoped for. We already know what needs to be done, as the economists have worked it out. It is true that economists are not exactly the flavour of the month right now, but they are still the experts here.
We are trying to change people’s behaviour, and long experience tells us that the way to do that is to change the incentives people face. We might make it illegal to burn coal, for example — as we largely have done in British cities — and the motivation people would have for doing so would be an incentive not to.
Yet observation of humans over the past couple of centuries has shown that the carrot tends to provide a better incentive than the stick. Being shot for failing the Five Year Plan should concentrate minds more than the alternatives of bankruptcy or hot and cold running lingerie models which our own system provides for failure or success, but which has been better at producing economic growth? Quite.
What many had hoped would result from the Copenhagen meetings was an embryo form of world government . . . and the idea that it was being snuck into the discussions under cover of environmental concerns was a feature, from the point of view of those who favour supra-national controls. No democratic leader arrived in town with a mandate to give up national sovereignty, but many attending hoped that they could “do a fast one” regardless.
